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The Fall of the Chantry
A tale of the Adepta Sororitas

“The Chantry of Saint Nimue of the Order of the Blind Raven, which would later be known as the Jiangton Temple, was not tied to one of the Emperor’s billion worlds. It drifted, ready to attend any outbreak of heresy in a silent blink of the Warp. It was a great, black city, more than five miles long - a former hunter of the Imperial Battlefleet, now repurposed to serve as one of the feared Black Ships of the Ordo Hereticus. It was an instrument of the Emperor’s will, a shrine to Saint Nimue, long lost to the Maelstrom, and a home, scholam, and armoury for her bonded daughters in the Adepta Sororitas.

“The Chantry was a city of faith, alone in the void, governed by Inquisitor-Canoness Leda Jiangton. The snout housed the Battle Sisters’ staging area, the loading halls and the landing birds. This was where the new recruits were brought in, where crusades were assembled. At the rear, perpetual braziers fired the ship’s conventional engines and consumed those dregs of heresy which could not be turned to the light, the roar of the flames soothed with song and prayer. The central body contained the living quarters - hundreds of rooms, for adjuncts, servitors, and priests, for the holy Battle Sisters and the Choir and the servants of the Inquisition. Novitiates trained in the Garden of Saint Nimue, underneath its falling red blossoms and its crystal window to the stars. Devotions were sung to the Emperor in four dozen chapels, and in the Grand Cathedral, over the altar to the Saint’s ruined helm. And in the cells and the interrogation rooms, Haight and Wax together plucked out the truth, and fed the truthful to the Admechs for penance or arco-flagellation.

“It was a gemstone of the Imperium, luminescent in the endless night. And now… Now there is only Haight.”

From The Storm That Took the Ordos, by Lord Inquisitor Ximineth Rahne.

ONE
A reminder and a comfort.
Mother of Swords.
Mercut Prime is on fire.

Long ago, a golden tower stood by the side of a dark sea. And the song of the tower calmed the deep water.

What did the left eye of Saint Nimue see, in the moment before it was plucked and spiralled vivid by the Maelstrom? The teeth and tendrils of a gibbering daemon thing, perhaps, wrought in neon witchfire by the storm? Or the faces of her sisters, mercifully immolated before they too could fall?

Perhaps her final prayer was answered, and she saw herself carried by the Great Raven to the Crones, and in their ageless company she stood to give account before the golden seat of the Emperor.

Perhaps, after everything, she was welcomed into His light.

Marian Matins opened her eyes. In that brief moment of stillness, she considered the object clutched between her hands. A tiny memento mori, crudely carved from pinion bone, set like a fine-cut gem in its golden housing and hammered into the symbol of the Inquisition. A reminder and a comfort. On either side of the icon, the string carried as many silver prayer beads as there were chapels on the Chantry. Some of her sisters would count them as they sang, but Marian had always preferred her devotions to grow free form in her imagination.

Not for her, the formulaic tick of numbers. Too predictable.

She felt a familiar, sickening creak at the back of her head as the dampeners lowered and the Chantry dropped out of the Warp. Then a rush of adrenaline as they flared again, choral sirens blaring. Too close, she thought. Who would settle this far in?

The High Chapel of the Helm was nearest to Command, and as she rose from her kneeling position Matins could hear the sound of running footsteps on the gantry outside. Hooking the rosary back onto her belt, she strode towards the open door. A coven of voidswomen rattled down the iron balcony, barking numbers and protocols at one another through their long, hooked rebreathers. In the far corner, three of Sister Agate’s Retributors huddled, caught in whispers. “You three.” Matins pointed at them. “To your stations, please, or to prayer.”

“Yes, Mother.” They nodded, each of them genuflecting before they headed sternward in the direction of the cloister and the armoury.

Synthetic red candlelight pulsed along the walls, in time with the alarms. A quavering electronic wail, dissonantly blended with an endless, rising vocal chorus. Words in High Gothic. A presence on the planet below. Matins passed under the archway to the Command Transept, briefly making eye-to-lens contact with Maester Navitas, who was buzzing and crackling his way down to the engine halls.

“Something on Thibault.” Navitas said, his voice a low hum of vox chatter. “Worse than expected.”

Command was packed close with urgent activity. Navitas’ servitors - all decorated skulls and raven-winged cherubs - flocked around the automated systems, cycling the alarms, checking and resetting levels. Pilots held tight to their control straps, compensating for the rough re-entry into realspace, while others tapped out coded affirmations, prayers, and signals on the Navigators’ glass dome, half-buried in the floor. The functionaries were, for the most part, keeping their focus on the Chantry’s welfare and trajectory. Working through the discomfort of the Warp drop and the Choir’s invasive hymnal shields. Some of them were pale. One or two were visibly shaking.

Vespers and the inquisitor, by contrast, were fully present. Both staring down the viewscreen.

Vespers leant forward in her chair, powdered chin resting on one impeccably manicured hand. Ingrid Vespers, Governess of the Chantry. Old as the ship, as the wilder of the Nine liked to say. Amidst the lights and the howl of the blaring alarm-song, she was immaculate, calm and polished. One of the Maester’s servo-skulls floated just behind Vespers’ head, tying a dark blue ribbon in her impossibly sculpted, grav-stabilised hair.

Matins looked around for Featherlight, but if the governess’ attendant was here, she was well hidden.

“Keep us at low orbit,” Vespers ordered. “Run a scan of the burning hive.”

“Scans won’t reveal what we need to see.” At the governess’ shoulder, Inquisitor Leda Jiangton narrowed her single, blue eye at the scarred and Warp-smudged curve of Thibault. The ocular implant that covered the left side of her face whirred and clicked as it surveyed local and planetary data, feeding morsels of information back to the Chantry’s archive - and mouthfuls, no doubt, to her own private records. “The illness is set in at the bedrock.”

Matins had known the inquisitor for four decades. Recognising her moment, she cleared her throat.

Immediately, Jiangton straightened and turned. “Swords,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“In my devotions.”

The inquisitor’s face softened, for a moment, and then she gestured towards the viewscreen. “Mercut Prime is on fire,” she said, building her deductions as she spoke. “If we’re lucky, if Their light is with us, that will be the untouched populace, drawing a perimeter by riot and rebellion.”

“Sacrificing themselves to prevent the spread.” Matins’ left hand went again to the rosary at her belt. “But, then, equally…”

“Yes. The flames could be the petals of the rot.”

There was a distant blink of blue-green on the viewscreen. Perhaps the fires had reached one of Mercut’s fuel stores, or one of the omni-generators. Vespers glanced over her shoulder, the skull chittering as it fumbled to re-adjust her bow. “Vox comms are clogged with static. There’s no way to know from up here.”

“We’re sending two squads to the surface.” Jiangton waved a hand, and the image on the screen shivered for a moment, shifting into a rotating gridline of the blighted hive. “Bedelia will take her Battle Sisters to the comms platform in the eastern quarter, to trace the source and scale of the corruption. If it’s run to the other hives…”

Matins nodded.

“Swords, you will accompany Hecate Rose and her Sisters to the northern quarter. On arrival, you will locate and make contact with my advance team of field agents, and together you will take the governor’s manse, at the top of the spire. After that…” Jiangton paused, sighed, and gestured again. The viewscreen’s feed of the surface was restored. “After we have taken the head, we will cleanse the body from orbit. In the Emperor’s holy name.”

TWO
An open wound.
Disposal or offering.
Level by level, home by home.

They made planetfall at dawn, as Thibault’s long, slow rotation rolled the city’s western edge into the golden-green light of the morning sun. A sleek, black landing craft churned up the blood and grit of one of Mercut’s mid-level courtyards, wrought iron talons scratching at the ground just long enough for Matins, Hecate Rose, and nine robed and armoured Battle Sisters to drop from the hatch and take up positions in the rubble.

Her delivery complete, the craft took wing again, and rumbled back into the sky.

No gunfire, Matins thought, as the departing ship disappeared, rattling the receptors in her helm. No tracking, no surface-to-air artillery. Either the guns had been silenced in the spreading fire, or some loyalist faction had taken control of the hive city’s defence positions. She let those two competing stories linger in her mind. Twin prayers for the untainted residents of Mercut Prime. Those who hoped for salvation but were now, necessarily, condemned.

Five hours now.

“Comms check,” she said. And the vox-caster in her high, black iron collar gleamed a bright silver.

“Check.” Rose’s stern, unshaken voice echoed back, distorted but clear. “Green lights across the board. First clicks are a level up.”

No life signs on this floor. Ahead of them, the wall of the white marble courtyard had been blown inward - a concave wreck, pox-marked with the hollow, jagged shells of market stalls and habs. Several overlapping melta charges, by the scale and colour of the damage. Placed for maximum casualties.

Something whispered low in the back of Matins’ head: A sacrifice.

Quietly, their footsteps covered by the wind that crashed in from Thibault’s great desert, they stepped into that wound carved into the city’s side. Charred smears of black and brown burst across the walls, where those initial charges had caught the luckier inhabitants. The stains were interspersed with deeper, red streaks and the violent spackle of more recent combat.

Laine took point. A tall, imposing figure in her black armour, she had given up the ability to speak during her training, and now communicated in gestures that were clearer than language. As she beckoned them on, the screen on her pack flashed two green-tinted arrows. Advance forward. Rose and another, younger Battle Sister, Cora, stayed close behind, carefully sweeping each shattered home and open shopfront for survivors. Knowing they would find none. Matins and the rest followed, weapons raised.

A half mile in from the primary detonation point, the stains were less abstract. Patches of blood were daubed like paint. Desperate, screaming faces, all blind rage and fury; arcane symbols whose weird intentionality caused Matins’ stomach to lurch. She felt a cold itch at the nape of her neck, and tasted iron mist in the air, despite the rebreather in her helm.

They could hear the slaughter now. Further in, the wind had receded, giving let to the thunder of auto-fire and the dull thump of recurrent explosive impacts. Closer still, the grinding, sputtering engines of chainblades and dozens of choking, desperate voices.

Pain and terror. Triumphant exaltation.

The air itself was thicker here. Vaporised blood particulates, fine white dust and smoke, muddying the ambergris dawn light that seeped in through the cracks and shattered windows.

The district’s cargo elevator had fallen. The shaft was a half-blind step into a great abyss, broad enough to swallow an Exorcist tank, crackling with blue electrical fire along the walls. They had seen few bodies since their arrival, but the crimson streaks and impact points on the marble columns and steel support beams suggested this shaft as a method of disposal. Disposal or offering, the voice hissed again. An inverted altar. Around to the right, partially clogged with rubble, a stairwell built of iron mesh and steel led upward, the metal channeling and amplifying the sounds of violence above.

At the foot of the stairs, Cora flinched as a sudden, dulled explosion shook more dust from the ceiling. A new, high peal of injured voices quickly followed. Rose silently placed a hand on Cora’s shoulder as she passed, following Laine around the first turn of the stairwell. Matins, fifth in line, tapped the small charge stud on her plasma pistol, and the ocean-blue coils hummed vivid in their golden casing.

Two turns up, the first body almost knocked Laine off her feet. It reeled and screamed down from an upper doorway, tripping on the steps and spraying blood in garland arcs across the walls. A man, garbed like a merchant’s clerk, with an improvised weapon still gripped in his hand through muscle spasm or rigor. He careened off Laine’s right shoulder guard, painting her golden faceplate black and red, and fell twitching at Matins’ feet, blood bubbling down his chin, the deep bite of chainblade teeth leaking in his chest.

“Flank the door,” Matins ordered. “Medea, clear the hallway.”

A stinging swarm of autogun rounds sparked against the stairwell’s steel columns as Rose, Lydia, and blind Tiresia broke for the far edge of the open door. One bullet lodged itself in Tiresia’s breastplate, making her whole body twitch, but the black iron of her armour did its job. She landed heavy against the wall beside Rose, her bare face calm and placid, already tilting her head to listen for the source of the volley.

In that second’s reload and reaction time, Sister Medea, who had pushed up from the back of their formation in a cloud of petroleum fumes, turned full-bodied into the doorway and squeezed the upper handle of her oversized flamer.

The hall lit up. The righteous heat of it hit harder than the desert wind or the weapons of the enemy.

They stepped into the fire.

Cured flesh and brittle bone-ash crunched like fresh snow underneath their boots. Three steps in, a wailing, charred cultist flew at Laine, chainaxe in hand, only to be thrown back by the concussive impact of her bolter round. More followed, pushing through the smoke and flames with feral yells, but Rose’s squad had fanned into the hallway now, and the heretics were beaten down by a chorus of metallic raven croaks and low, implosive detonations. Five blessed boltguns, all singing in harmony.

More of those patterns and symbols, painted in blood across the marble walls. Bullet holes joined like dots on a child’s puzzle.

They advanced, stepping over the dead, the crimson lenses in their helmets picking out targets in the smoke. The heretics were distracted; their attention split between their previous victims and the vengeance of the holy God-Emperor now approaching from the rear. Further down the hallway, Matins could see one fanatic kneeling over another citizen’s lifeless wreckage, his back turned. She boiled the maniac’s head with her charged plasma burst, then signalled to Medea. “Again.”

As Medea readied the flamer for a second blast, Matins spoke into her vox-link. “The rest of you, three groups. Clear the habs.” Immediately, she broke left, and Tiresia, Cora, and Mascia followed.

Lydia, Jax, and hooded Patience went with Rose, to the right. Laine and Gratia fell into step behind Medea, advancing along the hallway.

The first apartment was a mess of black smoke and
blood. Matins could see red streaks on the floor, drag marks leading out towards the elevator shaft. The furniture in the entrance and the main living space had all been broken or turned over. Patterns of shattered glass and synthetic padding cracked and crumbled underfoot. At once, they heard an awful scream from the far door, and another of the cultists turned into the room. She was a wild shadow in the murk, brandishing a whirring chainsword and a cheap, line-worked pistol. Another followed behind, wearing a butcher’s apron and carrying the tools of the same trade.

He was the one who had screamed. Threats and blasphemies foamed from his mouth, and on his apron Matins recognised the same howling faces and icons they’d seen painted in similar pigment across the marble walls. Ducking low, she holstered her pistol and unsheathed Wishbone from its fine leather scabbard at her left hip. She brought the powered longsword up in an overhead block, and it bucked against the downward swing of the first cultist’s blade. The impact of the grinding teeth against Matins’ weapon cut through the screams, and sparks flashed like lightning on the smoke. Her armour made it easy to push the chainsword back into a crescent sweep, and in the opening she turned Wishbone and ran the cultist through.

Two steps behind. Tiresia raised her bolt carbine and with a quiet smile and milky eyes closed she tilted her head. The butcher’s frenzied yells made it easy; the round took him off his feet and sent him crashing back through the doorway.

They followed, Mascia taking point.

In the next room, two heretics had paused in their sacrificing to eat the remnants of a meal on the dining table. As soon as Mascia passed through the doorway, she was jumped from the near corner, her helm knocked away with a swing of an axe. She staggered, and at once her assailant was on her, shouting jubilant curses and flecking spittle into her face. He was a thick-set man with a bare chest and a shaved head, wrapped from the waist up in old leather straps. He exalted in his petty victory, rearing up and spinning the axe in his hands just long enough for Tiresia to put a bolt round through his throat. The shell’s detonation severed his head.

Still bleeding from the impact to her temple, and protecting her wrenched neck with her left shoulder, Mascia kicked the legs out from under the second man - a wild-eyed youth in a painted rebreather mask - and rolled on top of him, driving the barrel of her boltgun into his jaw with a vicious crack.

“That’s one,” Matins said, managing to keep her voice steady. “Three more habitats on this side. Ten to the stairs, and then five floors up to the meeting point.”

She turned back to look at Cora. The younger Sister’s helm was still and impassive. But her hands were fidgeting with her bolter. It looked heavy.

They continued, level by level, home by home. The loyalists here were either dead or beyond saving, and so at each floor Medea cleared the hallway before the rest moved in. Matins turned each vignette over in her mind: the missing, the living and the dead. Perhaps two thirds of the population had fallen, turning on their neighbours, murdering their way up to the manse at the hive’s peak. She wondered what abominable inspiration might have summoned so many.

And she thought of the storm. The patterns in the pounding whirl of iron, heat, and white dust.

Too far in.

As they went further up, the lines became blurred. Where once it had been easy to distinguish the cult fanatics from the citizenry, soon they were assaulted by merchants, craftsmen, officials. The weapons in their hands were mass produced, improvised, and adapted. A few looked to be antiques. All chosen to cause the most damage.

Three levels up from the landing point, Matins and Medea noticed smaller bones in the ashes. Neither of them would speak of it, for as long as they lived.

The symbols were blurring too. The faces and the iconography now merged into a more distinct shape. Eyes painted with three straight lines. The outline of a skull. Rough, square teeth, pointing down. The symbol repeated, and repeated, a silent chant in blood that drew fingernail shivers down Matins’ spine.

Four levels up, they lost Mascia. Furious in her zeal, half blind from the blood pooling in her helmet, she was knocked off balance by a mad pebbledash of auto fire in one of the ministers’ suites, before a larger, well-dressed cultist, a man with ogryn blood, barrelled her into a corner and pushed a sharpened breadknife under her arm, between the black iron plates.

It was Cora who felled the giant, bolter held in steady hands.

Matins, across the hall, would only hear the story later.

THREE
A war amongst the Enforcers.
No rescue.
The Enlightener’s tale.

They had landed seven levels below the governor’s manse, some three thousand feet above ground. The Lord Governor of Thibault occupied rooms and offices at the highest pinnacle of Mercut Prime, a suite that had been deliberately shielded from the wider populace by two lower floors assigned to visiting dignitaries, Astra Militarum reps, and officials of the Ministorum. The staircase to the uppermost floor was surrounded by a command centre for the planetary Arbites, and it was here that they found the battle bludgeoned to a stalemate.

A civil war amongst the Enforcers. Bodies at the gatepost; bodies by the inner gate. The loyalists had won, but now they were trapped. Keeping the lords of the rebellion from the rampage of their ground troops, and desperately trying to prevent the cultists from liberating their master.

After Mascia, the ranks of the traitors had thickened. The remaining ten Sisters of the Chantry had spent an hour carving their way through armoured and heavily armed rebel forces to reach the command post.

They were bloodied and tired. Cora and the taciturn Sister Gratia carried Mascia between them, weapons slung on leather straps over their shoulders. At the singing of the Imperial Creed, the few remaining Arbites at the command post lowered their stub-barrelled shotguns and allowed the blessed Sisters passage into their quiet, charnel haven. Some bowed, reverently, whilst others muttered under their breath. They too were tired. And they had no way out.

As Matins’ team approached the security gate to the central staircase, one Enforcer stepped forward. “Well,” he said, his hands forming a rough double eagle across his chest, “Emperor be praised.” The side of the man’s face was torn and recently cauterised. He was not cowed in the Sororitas’ presence.

“Are you the commanding officer here?” Matins asked.

He let out a mirthless smirk, and nodded towards a pile of bodies stacked close to the entrance. “I am now.”

He glanced over Matins’ shoulder, as best he could. She was a head taller than him in her armour. “You’ve cleared a path?” he asked, earnest now.

Matins nodded. “It will close again.”

The Enforcer considered this, looking around at his fellows. They were carrying horrific injuries, and there were more dead than alive. “But you’ve come for the Beast? For Lodvik? Is our duty at an end?”

“Your duty ends in death,” Rose spoke up before Matins could respond. “You will make sure we are not followed, and keep the next wave of heretics at bay long enough for our deed to be done.”

Matins sighed, and added, “In the service of the Inquisition, and in the Emperor’s holy name.”

He hesitated, and Matins saw the twitch in his face, knuckles turning white around the grip of his shotgun. Carefully, she removed her black iron and gold helm, to look the man in the eye. Something about her face seemed to catch him off guard. “Your homes are lost,” she said. “Mercut Prime has fallen to the ruinous powers. No rescue is coming.”

A single tear ran down the Enforcer’s cheek, forming a river delta in his scars. “The Emperor has not sent angels to save us,” he said. It was not a question.

“Only to cleanse,” the Mother of Swords responded, “and contain.” She offered him a final, sad smile, then vanished again beneath her black iron and gold. “Show us the way up to the manse.”

The gate was sealed, but clear. The bodies were all piled in neat ranks under torn curtains and banners.

“We pushed them back to the door above,” the Enforcer said, pride creeping into his voice. “Managed to lock it. Then the high-ups came and bid us hold the line downstairs. That was while the Proctor was still standing.”

“High-ups?” Matins asked.

“‘Ministratum or clergy,” he shrugged. “Proctor told us not to mess with ‘em. Just… Just let them through and hold the line. Been quiet up there for an hour now. Trouble’s all come from the habs.”

“Open the gate.”

The staircase was silent, its thick, central layer of carpeting soaked and matted with red. There were no angles or turns - the steps ran straight up to the door of the manse. Leaving the Arbites to their final duty, Matins ascended, her Sisters close behind. The crimson glow of Wishbone danced along the ruined walls, glinting off the shotgun spatter and the gouges that had been cut into the white marble. Her sidearm was charged in her off hand.

From behind the high double doors, all gilt and carved with laurel wreaths, they could hear no sound of battle. No gunfire. Only one, male voice, screaming. Without a word, Matins disengaged the Arbites’ thermal clamp, handing it off to Laine, and shouldered the near side open, pistol raised.

They stepped into a brightly lit reception chamber. Velvet couches and recliners lined the walls on either side, and a long stone desk had been used to block the opposite door. Stacks of ammunition, data slates and other boxed equipment had turned the lobby into a storage space, and their canvas coveralls and pallets bore the flower of the Sororitas, the open wings of the Raven, and other holy symbols of the Chantry. Matins felt an unexpected pang of comfort at the sight of them.

The screams were emitting from a man suspended upside down from the room’s central fluorescent light. He was shirtless, and across his torso was painted that same awful, angular skull which had been thrown by the rebels onto the walls downstairs. It was clearly drawn, but clumsy. Self-applied.

Parts of the icon were hidden now in blood. A section of the man’s belly had been flayed.

A thin, angular creature paced around the upturned heretic. A man clad in long, dusk-brown robes under a stained blue-grey alb. Strapped behind his back, giving his slender frame a peculiar hunch, three heavy maglev generators whirred and hummed. Two of them held sheathed blades. He wore gloves of black leather, now slick with penitent blood, and a matching black mask that pulled his bald head out into a pointed beak. Behind it, his eyes were two dark pinpoints.

“Wax,” Matins said.

Corvus Wax tilted his head, like a crow sighting a morsel of food. “Mother,” he responded, his reed-like voice muted further by the mask. “We’ve been waiting.” The Enlightener pulled a third blade from the flesh of the hanging man, eliciting another wail of pain, and dropped it delicately into the air. It was lifted and caught by the empty maglev sheath. “This one isn’t talking. He has nothing to say about the origins or purpose of the rebellion. He is, however, very apologetic about it.”

Matins nodded, chewing on her lower lip behind her helmet. Iron in the air again. “What has happened?” she asked, her voice steady.

Wax shrugged, the mechanical hum from his back changing pitch for a moment, and lifted an autopistol out of the holster at his side. “Too many to count. And too many more on the way. The violence is spreading like a virus. And the Enforcers have made a sow’s ear of this place.” He shot the hanging man through the head. “It’s a miracle we got through.”

Matins could feel her grip tightening around the hilt of Wishbone. Her Sisters - even Rose, in her grace and wisdom - remained silent. “Where is Haight?”

“He took the others and went in.” Wax gestured towards the door behind the desk. “You know he’s not a patient man. Especially where heresy is concerned. He wants the governor, for the Mother of Eyes. I’m expecting his summons at any moment.”